My Fight for a New Taiwan

One Woman's Journey from Prison to Power

Hsiu-lien Lu, Ashley Esarey

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805054
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Lu Hsiu-lien's journey is the story of Taiwan. Through her successive drives for gender equality, human rights, political reform, Taiwan independence, and, currently, environmental protection, Lu has played a key role in Taiwan's evolution from dictatorship to democracy. The election in 2000 of Democratic Progressive Party leader Chen Shui-bian to the presidency, with Lu as his vice president, ended more than fifty years of rule by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). Taiwan's painful struggle for democratization is dramatized here in the life of Lu, a feminist leader and pro-democracy advocate who was imprisoned for more than five years in the 1980s. Unlike such famous Asian women politicians as Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, India's Indira Gandhi, and Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, Lu Hsiu-lien grew up in a family without political connections. Her impoverished parents twice attempted to give her away for adoption, and as an adult she survived cancer and imprisonment, later achieving success as an elected politician—the first self-made woman to serve with such prominence in Asia. My Fight for a New Taiwan 's rich narrative gives readers an insider's perspective on Taiwan's unique blend of Chinese and indigenous culture and recent social transformation.

CHAPTER 1

DREAMS COME TRUE

THE WAIL OF A THOUSAND AIR HORNS, THE CRACKLING SHOWER of fireworks, the undulation of a sea of banners greeted us as we left our party headquarters and approached the stage. A crowd stretched for half a mile in every direction, claiming streets and sidewalks, jamming intersections on Minsheng East Road. Bottle rockets shrieked from the windows of nearby apartment buildings. To an outsider observing the revelers on the night of March 18, 2000, the crowds in the streets could have been celebrating the Taiwan national team's victory in some sort of world championship, but the pride of the Taiwanese was participatory, not vicarious: They had voted to remove the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) from the nation's highest office after its fifty-five years in power and had stood up to China despite its threats to invade Taiwan if they dared vote this way. They had cast aside the successors of a regime that had ruled Taiwan by force and fiat, by threat and murder, by corruption and co-optation, by autocracy and exploitation. On March 18, the Taiwanese had, through their vote, peacefully “changed the heavens” in their homeland, as the saying went, and given birth to the feeling that Taiwan was experiencing its finest hour, that the wrongs of the past could be righted.

What a coincidence it was! On the very same day twenty years before, March 18, 1980, I stood in a military courtroom as one of the eight main defendants charged with sedition for leading a demonstration on Human Rights Day. An intense man unknown outside legal circles, Chen Shui-bian, had been among our legal defense attorneys. Even our lawyers' valiant efforts had not prevented the court from sentencing us to lengthy prison terms on the basis of confessions elicited through torture. Who would have dared predict that two decades later, one of the defense lawyers and one of the codefendants would be elected president and vice president of the country at the crowning moment of Taiwan's struggle for democracy?

The hope that the Nationalists would one day be turned out of power had sustained me while I served five and a half years in prison for criticizing their authoritarian regime. I had been waiting for the celebration of March 2000 since my childhood, when I had denounced my schoolteacher for changing the grades of the daughter of a Nationalist official because the teacher wanted to ingratiate himself with the government. Since my recovery from cancer in the 1970s, I had sworn to dedicate my life to equal political participation for all members of Taiwanese society and for all ethnic groups. I had prayed for the replacement of the Nationalist government with a democratically elected opposition since my realization, in prison, that the shock of my incarceration had cost my mother her life.

Although I had dreamed of such a moment, somehow I'd never imagined how victory might feel when it blossomed like a flower more fragrant than the evening primrose. Certainly not during the long months of campaigning in 1999 and 2000, when I'd appeared with Chen Shui-bian at six political rallies each night, speaking until my voice grew hoarse and cracked—I was too busy fighting to win the election. Yet the moment did come, with the decisiveness of nightfall in the tropics. From school yards and post offices across the island, election volunteers counted the votes signaling the Nationalists' defeat. The Democratic Progressive Party had captured the presidential palace, formerly the bastion of power for Chiang Kai-shek and the symbol of authority for Japanese colonial governors. On the night of March 18, 2000, the specter of foreign dominance departed with the defeat of the Nationalists, a political party transplanted to Taiwan from China after World War II. For the first time in the history of Taiwan, a native Taiwanese man from a poor, landless family had become president. For the first time in five thousand years of Chinese history, I, a woman from an ordinary family, had been elected by the public to serve the number-two position in an ethnically Chinese nation.

Twenty-two years had passed since I had first taken the podium at a political rally, challenging, among other things, the Nationalist censorship of the news media. At that time, Taiwan lived under martial law; all media organizations that did not toe the party line were promptly shut down. Now, with the president-elect, Chen Shui-bian, I stood blinking under the lights of nearly a hundred television cameras, addressing a free media, free ourselves to speak in any manner that we chose, even to speak in English, the language I used to explain the significance of our victory to the foreign press:

 

Today, March 18th, 2000, the people of Taiwan have spoken, and their voice, so long muted, has sung out for the world to hear. Today, we have witnessed a glorious revolution, the culmination of a peaceful democratic transformation of our country. Today, Taiwan's people have chosen Mr. Chen Shui-bian to be their next president and me as their next vice president. They have chosen to stand up for democracy in their country and peace in the world.

Taiwan can today celebrate the full flowering of her democracy. Chen Shui-bian and I will bring to Taiwan a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; a government that fosters respect for human rights and the rule of law; a government that is free of corruption and cronyism; a government that is truly accountable to her citizens. We will ensure the stability of our open and free society and the health of our country's thriving market economy. We will also create a new era of goodwill and lasting peace with China and all our neighbors….

To China's leaders, I wish to extend an invitation to leave behind past conflict and walk toward a future of harmonious coexistence with Taiwan and all other nations of the world. This election represents the possibility of a fresh new beginning. The historical enmity between the Nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party need no longer poison the relationship between Taiwan and China….

Taiwan became today the first country in the world with a Confucian cultural heritage to elect a woman vice president. This election victory, therefore, is not just a triumph for democracy, but also a milestone for gender equality in government. With the slogan “50-50 by 2000,” the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women set the goal of women's equal participation in politics and society by the year 2000. Taiwan can be proud to be one of the very few countries in the world to fulfill that goal at the highest level of government. For me personally, as well, this achievement is the culmination of thirty years of struggle for women's rights….

I wish to thank the people of Taiwan for their courage and wisdom in exercising their right to determine their own fate. I also wish to thank all the leaders of the world who have supported Taiwan's democracy and the right of our people to fairly and freely choose their own leaders. And lastly I wish to thank the many members of the media from across the globe who have brought the story of Taiwan's political transformation to the world.

In 1994, after many years of struggle, black South Africans were able for the first time to vote for their country's president. I stood alongside Mr. Nelson Mandela on that election day when he cast his vote in the small rural village where the African National Congress was born. It was after the results of that historic ballot were announced that he proclaimed the birth of a new South Africa. Today, with this election, we may joyfully proclaim the birth of a new Taiwan. A Taiwan in which the people have risen above fear to speak their hopes. A Taiwan in which women and men are equal and free. A Taiwan in which democracy has come to full flower, for all the world to see.

 

Our presidential campaign in spring of the year 2000 had been the most hotly contested election in the history of Taiwanese democracy. The Nationalists, split by internal division, forwarded two candidates, one official and one running as an independent. Both candidates were tainted by allegations of corruption and ties to members of organized crime. This time, the party's hallmark vote buying, the strategy by which it had maintained power in elections after the introduction of democracy, failed to rekindle the traditional loyalty. Sick of the Nationalist Party corruption, the Taiwanese voted to set the country on a new course.

On March 18, 2000, more than 82 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, a much higher voter participation rate than that of many Western countries. Only two hours after the polls closed, the vast majority of twelve million votes had been counted and the Nationalist candidate, Lien Chan, had fallen in ignominious defeat with 23 percent of the vote; the former Nationalist provincial governor, James Soong, running as an independent, claimed 36 percent of the vote. The former mayor of Taipei, Chen Shui-bian, and I won the election with nearly 40 percent, a narrow mandate for reform at the dawn of a new era.

For the die-hard supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party, established in 1986 by the members of Taiwan's opposition movement in violation of a ban on political parties, the triumph of March 18, 2000, had been a long time coming. The Nationalist Party had dominated Taiwan politics since 1945. For thirty-eight years, the Leninist party-state had ruled by imposing martial law and by quashing political dissent, censoring the media, and controlling the judiciary.

Throughout Taiwan's history, foreign powers had attempted to control the fate of the island: the Dutch and Spanish in the seventeenth century, the Manchus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Japanese from 1895 to 1945, and the Nationalists after Japan's defeat in World War II. The year 2000 proved no exception, as the Chinese Communists threatened Taiwan with war if Taiwanese voters elected us. Chinese premier Zhu Rongji held a press conference in the final days of the campaign, threatening military invasion if the Taiwanese elected a candidate committed to “any kind of independence” from China.

Although the Chinese Communists have never controlled Taiwan, China claims sovereignty over my country because Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese. Beijing's veiled reference to Chen Shui-bian and me struck fear into the hearts of some voters, but it backfired with many more, who resented China's attempt to control the island's democracy through strong-arm tactics.

Our election victory was the expression of collective aspirations for freedom from the yoke of the Nationalist Party. It was the expression of hope that Taiwan's economy will thrive through new liberalization and administrative efficiency. Fifty-five years of Nationalist rule had resulted in environmental degradation, inadequate transportation networks, complacency and nepotism in the bureaucracy, and a judiciary emasculated by corruption.

This is the story of how Taiwan came to such a crossroad in history, as well as the story of how a girl who was twice nearly given away as a child discovered a love for her country that would change her life. It is the story of how a woman who suffered from cancer, imprisonment, and torture found ways to love her country through democratic politics and to advance the cause of freedom in the world. This is the true story of my life.

CHAPTER 2

TAIWANESE DAUGHTER

WHEN THEY WERE NEWLY MARRIED, FATHER AND MOTHER ONCE came upon an old fortune-teller who, beckoning to them, offered to predict their futures. Father was skeptical, but Mother, who was curious about what the old man might say, wanted to give him a chance.

Peering first into Father's eyes, the fortune-teller said, “You have the fate to have one son.” Then he turned to Mother and said, “You have the fate to have three sons.” It was an unsettling prediction, but it turned out to be true. Over the years Mother ended up miscarrying two male babies, and my brother Chuan-sheng was the only son who survived.

I was born amid the D-Day news on June 7, 1944. My arrival was certainly less dramatic than a military invasion. If anything, it was something of a disappointment; my parents had been hoping for a boy. They already had two daughters, Hsiu-ching and Hsiu-rong, twelve and fourteen years my senior; and then my brother Chuan-sheng, eight years older than me. If I had been a boy, the family would have been perfect in my parents' eyes—two girls and two boys.

My parents named me Hsiu-lien, or “graceful water lily.” From an early age I realized that I had let down my parents by being a girl. When I misbehaved, Mother let her disappointment show by saying things like, “Don't be naughty, or I'll give you away!” or, “Watch out or I'll put you in a trash can!” I wanted to say to them, “You are the ones who made me; it's not that I asked to come here.”

We lived in the county of Taoyuan, in northern Taiwan, around twenty-five miles south of the capital of Taipei. My ancestors came from the region of Zhangzhou in Fujian, China. Nearly everyone in the large Lu clan to which I belong is descended from Lu Ting-yu, who immigrated to Taiwan around 1860 with his newly wedded wife. Since then, our family has lived in Taiwan for eight generations and has produced more than seven thousand descendants.

Mostly farmers, my ancestors were poor. My grandfather was a farmer, as was Father until he became a shopkeeper. Father sold salted fish during the Japanese Occupation of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. In those days most Taiwanese couldn't afford to eat meat, but a little salted fish went a long way when they ate it with rice. With talent for business and sincerity in his dealings with others, Father enjoyed a measure of financial success, eventually expanding the family business to three shops in different towns with the help of partners.

Unlike many couples in their generation, my parents had married for love, rejecting the marriages arranged by their families. When they met, my parents had both already been assigned to their respective intended spouses. Mother was living in the same house with her foster family and husband-to-be. But after meeting each other, my parents refused to go through with marrying their prospective partners. It caused a big scandal, which is why I never heard the full story until both of them had passed away. I'm proud of this family rebelliousness. It explains how they endured years of hardship when our family's fortunes later turned bleak.

In those days it was common in Taiwan to give away a girl to become a simpua, or foster daughter, to another family. The girl helped with household chores until she was old enough to marry a foster “brother” in her household. To be a simpua was usually a miserable lot. The girl would have to fetch and carry things, labor like a maid, and act very meek and quiet, all from an early age. Several girls in my sixth-grade class of fifty had been adopted out or even sold to other families.

With two daughters already, my parents nearly gave me away as a simpua, not once but twice. When I was almost two years old, a friend of Father's wanted to adopt me because the man and his wife had no children. As a toddler I had big, round, pink cheeks, and because of that, people called me Ringo, the Japanese word for apple. The wife once saw me and said, “What a pretty girl you have! I wish she were mine.” Father responded half jokingly, “You can have her! I already have two daughters.”

The couple took his offer seriously. After a few days they sent a go-between to ask my parents again. Of course they would have preferred to have a son, but people believed this kind of daughter-in-law adoption, called a “lead in,” encouraged the spirit of a baby boy to follow. After carefully considering the cost of raising another daughter, Mother agreed to allow the adoption. The couple sent over the first round of gifts, including traditional cakes made of popped rice.

When my brother and sisters heard about the planned adoption, they hatched a plot to save me. Brother, who must have been about ten years old, grabbed me when Mother wasn't looking and carried me off to the home of an aunt living in the countryside. The agreement had been made, engagement gifts received, but I was nowhere to be found. Brother was missing too; for an entire day we hid. Finally Eldest Sister told Mother what they had done. The other family, seeing how much my siblings loved me, called off the adoption, and my parents returned the gifts.

The second time I was almost given away was a few years later. Our family's finances had improved, but the interested party was a wealthy neighboring doctor. Mother believed that I would have an easier life as their only daughter. But as discussions between our two families dragged on, the doctor decided to adopt one of his brother's daughters instead.

When I was an infant, Japan still ruled Taiwan. Most Japanese looked down on Taiwanese, calling us Shi na, which is comparable to the epithet “Chink” in English. So when there was talk of Taiwan reverting back to Chinese rule at the end of World War II, people felt hopeful and optimistic, thinking, “At long last we will have self-rule and equality!”

High expectations led to tragic disappointment. Chiang Kai-shek, accepting Japan's surrender of Taiwan on behalf of General Douglas MacArthur, sent the dregs of his army to Taiwan. Chiang needed his best commanders and troops to remain in China to continue fighting the Communists. As stories circulated of how the new arrivals pillaged and raped, confiscating private property and mistreating people, Taiwanese enthusiasm for Chinese rule vanished.

I was almost three years old when strife between Taiwanese, demonstrating for autonomy, and Chinese troops, cracking down on dissidence, engulfed the island in violence. Chiang Kai-shek sent thirty thousand soldiers to Taiwan, where they put down unrest by spraying crowds of civilians with machine gun fire. Under orders to eliminate resistance from the island's elite, the troops dragged intellectuals from their homes and herded them together for mass executions. Thousands disappeared and an entire generation was silenced. The Taiwanese uprising and the ensuing massacre carried out by Chinese soldiers is known as the “2-28 Incident,” named for the first day of Taiwanese protests on February 28, 1947.

Mother was attending a wedding ceremony in Hsinchu, with Eldest Sister and me, when news of widespread rioting reached the wedding banquet. Nervous and frightened, everyone made plans to leave, only to find that all bus and train service had been suspended. Mother had to walk all the way home to Taoyuan with me wr...